Karen Kelsky – “Dr Karen” as she calls herself – is worried that UK academics may be shocked at her message on her tour of universities this month. “I think they are probably going to freak out,” she says. “I go to American campuses where people know me … and people are always shocked at how blunt I am. So I’m actually kind of worried about what will happen in the UK.”

Kelsky, a former professor and now job consultant for academics, is known in US academic circles for her criticisms of how higher education has changed, including the financial burden on postgraduates, and writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the travails of finding a secure job. The market for good academic jobs has deteriorated enormously, she believes, and her message to anyone hoping to forge an academic career, be it in the US or the UK, is: be under no illusions.

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Kelsky has built a reputation as a critic of privatisation and “corporatisation” of higher education. While a better landscape for jobs, and better-paid ones, would undoubtedly be good for her business, she insists her outspokenness is also conscience-driven because marketising education has potentially profound social consequences.

Kelsky’s tour of UK campuses – her itinerary includes Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Edinburgh and Warwick – which started last week, is intended to bring her experience assisting young US academics to their equivalents in the UK. Ostensibly she’ll be offering advice on how to land a job in the US, from how to locate jobs to filling in application forms, but she will also be highlighting what she believes are systemic threats to higher education.

Kelsky was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and did her first degree, in Japanese language and literature, at the University of Michigan before completing a PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of Hawaii. She was a department head in east Asian languages and cultures and associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But after an academic career of some 15 years, she gave it up. A period of unhappiness at work coincided with a divorce, and she decided to make a new start with her own business.

In 2011 she founded the consultancy company and blog The Professor Is In, and is the author of a book by the same name. Her business primarily involves advising graduate students on finding full-time positions, as well as holding workshops and giving talks. Now based in Oregon, she has her sights on the UK, which, she says, already accounts for 20% of the her business.

Karen Kelsky: ‘Only about 25% of university instructors are actually securely employed professors, and the other 75% are hired on a contingent basis without any benefits.’

Kelsky says she’s filling a gap at universities in both the US and UK, where established professors supervising postgraduates are often woeful at coaching them in finding work. Careers departments make “heroic” efforts, she says, but it’s not enough. Too many supervisors leave PhD students ill-prepared for the rigour of chasing the few stable jobs.

“My UK clients are confronting the same basic set of circumstances,” she says. Kelsky sees herself as a campaigner for workers’ rights. Although the number of full-time academic posts has been declining since the 70s, she says, the numbers doing PhDs have soared. This causes huge problems, even poverty.

“Now, [in the US] only about 25% of university instructors are actually securely employed professors, and the other 75% are hired on a contingent basis without any benefits, without any job security, without any health insurance. And 25% of that 75% are paid so poorly they live below the poverty line. They qualify for public assistance in the US. It’s a terrible, terrible way to live. It is in a bone fide crisis.”

Kelsky believes that era-defining neoliberal political shifts in Britain and the US, ushered in initially by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, generated policies that transformed higher education, legitimising “de-funding” by taxpayers and placing unprecedented financial burdens on students and their families.

As yet UK student debts haven’t reached the levels of their American counterparts, but the US should act as a grim warning, she says. “Graduate student debt is the fastest growing debt there is in the US,” she says. The debt is so huge that many can’t pay it off: “It has increased to an average in the arts and humanities of something like $50,000.”

Kelsky also condemns soaring rises in salaries of university bosses as siphoning cash from a system under intense financial pressure, and when so many students and staff are struggling to subsist.

When it comes to higher education, it’s wrong, she says, for governments to “get out of the way and to turn everything into a commodity and to allow corporations to dictate the direction of everything. [Universities] got taken over by this profit imperative and when enough corporate influencers got into enough positions of influence, the entire ethos shifted.”

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The bigger picture in the US, she says, is there is no longer a belief in education as “a public right and a public good”.

“Every country should adequately fund its institutions of higher education,” Kelsky says. The consequences of this lack of public moral purpose include reduced participation by people from disadvantaged backgrounds. “The most privileged institutions that serve the most privileged classes will survive. They have private endowments and funding models that are actually wealthier now than they were five years ago.”

While the UK may not be as far down the track of privatisation – or as she puts it the “vitriolic anti-intellectualism” – or suffering the outlandish student debt of the US, Kelsky warns that it is “stunningly far down the road” on what she calls “neoliberal productivity rubrics”. She means the REF, or Research Excellence Framework, the system used to assess UK academics’ “output”, which includes targets, for example, on the number of journal articles published.

“You can’t quantify academic productivity the way you can other kinds of productivity. You could point to countless people who probably wrote one book in their entire career but that book changed the way we think.”

It isn’t all bleak, though, otherwise she would be out of a business. “You can still have a very nice life as a professor if you score one of these scarce [permanent] jobs. This is a precarious situation but there are still life rafts to land on,” she says. So if her UK audiences aren’t too depressed by her message, and want to continue in academia, she may even be able help land them a job.